A Convenient Bride For The Soldier. Christine Merrill

are,’ Jake reminded him. ‘After all, you are the first of us to enter that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’

      Fred looked at him in puzzlement.

      ‘Marriage,’ Oliver supplied.

      ‘I believe Hamlet was referring to death,’ Fred said, finally able to manage a smile.

      ‘One of us has likely taken that journey already,’ Jake said, looking more dour than usual.

      ‘We do not know that,’ Oliver said quickly. ‘Nicholas is missing. That does not mean he is dead.’

      ‘There was a prodigious amount of blood,’ Jake reminded him.

      ‘But if it were a robbery, surely the thief would have taken his ring.’ Oliver produced it from his pocket, holding it out. Usually it was kept in a gilded box in the club’s private suite and Fred was surprised to see it.

      ‘If Nick meant to leave his old life behind, for whatever reason, it makes perfect sense that he would have abandoned an identifying piece of jewellery.’

      Fred stopped himself before snapping that it was in bad taste to bring a momento mori to a wedding. But it might be nothing of the kind. As Oliver had said, they could not be sure that their friend was dead.

      The alternatives were almost worse. If the blood was not his, whose had it been? Had their friend disappeared to escape a hangman’s noose? Fred would have thought that, had it been anything less than murder, Nick would have come to his three best friends for help.

      ‘It is all we have left of him now,’ Jake said, staring at the ring. ‘We were together at the start. We should be together now, if only in spirit. He would have wanted to be here for you, standing at your side with the rest of us.’

      To be honest, some small part of Fred had hoped that, once the announcement appeared in the paper, Nicholas Bartlett might show up in the church, as suddenly and unexpectedly as he had disappeared almost six years ago. Fred had been in Portugal when he’d got the news. One night, Nick had been at the club, just as always. The next morning, the only evidence of him they’d found was a puddle of blood in the alley behind the club and Nick’s signet trampled into the mud.

      At the sight of the ring, Fred thought what he’d always thought, when Nick was remembered.

      If I had been here, it would not have happened. Whatever it was, I’d have stopped it.

      He stared at the ring, which normally resided on the seat of Nick’s old chair. ‘I suppose, since you have brought this, it is time again?’

      ‘It seemed necessary,’ Jake said with difficulty. They were surprising words since, of the three of them, Jacob Huntington was the one of them most resistant to dredging up the past with what he deemed a silly ceremony. But he was probably right. If there was ever a day Fred needed all his friends, in body and spirit, it was this one.

      ‘Shall we begin?’ he asked.

      The other two nodded, suddenly sombre.

      ‘In Vitium et Virtus,’ they said in unison.

      Jake raised the flask he was holding. ‘To absent friends.’ He took a drink and passed it to Oliver.

      ‘Be he in heaven or hell—’ Oliver drank and passed the flask to Fred.

      ‘Or somewhere in between—’ Fred added, taking a drink.

      ‘Know that we wish you well,’ Jake finished, holding the ring out in his closed fist.

      The pair of them reached out, covering his hand with their own. They stood for a moment in silence before parting, almost embarrassed by the display of feeling. Oliver cleared his throat and Jake slipped the signet back into his pocket.

      ‘Partaking of spirits in a church?’

      Apparently, they had been too preoccupied with the past to notice that the bride and her family had finally arrived. Georgiana’s stepmother had caught them drinking and was staring at Fred as if he had just confirmed every horrible story she had heard about his family.

      The bride, however, gave a longing look at the flask as it disappeared back into Jake’s pocket, as if wishing she could finish what was left.

      He hardly blamed her. He had a good mind to request that Jake pass it back so he could share it with her. What were they doing? Even had they felt affection for each other, they had nothing in common. When he looked at her, young, untried, and fresh-faced in a primrose-yellow dress and a coronet of wildflowers, he felt a hundred years old. He was hardly that. He was not yet thirty. But he had seen too much and done too much to have anything at all in common with a green girl.

      As she so often was, when he’d seen her in public, Georgiana Knight was pouting, frowning, and snapping at her stepmother, like the child she was. Lady Grinsted was frowning as well as she fluffed the sleeves of the bride’s gown and tried to adjust the flowers in her hair. Her father walked two steps behind the pair, purposely oblivious to the drama playing out under his nose.

      ‘Apologise to Major Challenger for our late arrival,’ Lady Grinsted said with a brittle smile and a jab of a pin in Georgiana’s blonde hair.

      ‘It is Mr Challenger,’ Georgiana corrected, staring at the uniform he had chosen for wedding clothes. ‘The war has been over for some time.’

      ‘Now is no time to argue semantics,’ her stepmother hissed. ‘Apologise to him.’

      ‘It is not as if he could start without me,’ Georgiana supplied, glaring at him as if daring him to say otherwise. ‘And you should be the one to apologise, Marietta. The delay was not my fault. If you would have allowed me to choose my own clothing unchallenged, we would have been here half an hour ago.’

      ‘A day dress that is months old—’

      ‘Barely worn,’ the girl interrupted. ‘And it favours me.’

      ‘You should have bought a new gown. And woodbine and speedwell for flowers?’ Marietta said with a sniff of disgust. ‘You look as though you picked them out of the garden.’

      ‘Because I did,’ the girl replied.

      ‘There were roses and orchids in the hothouse on the roof.’

      ‘Where they can stay,’ Georgiana finished. ‘Since you like them, I left them for you to enjoy, now that you are finally to be rid of me.’

      Had the delay seriously been about something so trivial as the choice of flowers? She was lovely just as she was, the very picture of the bride he’d have wanted, had he wanted to marry at all. He failed to see what difference it made what she wore. He had promised to marry her and would have done so had she arrived wrapped in a grain sack.

      Or in a sheer dress that barely covered her charms. Why, of all times, was he imagining how she had looked on the night he’d made the offer? The thoughts he’d been having before he’d learned her identity were not appropriate for a church.

      Nor were they appropriate if he planned to leave his virgin bride untouched, as she had demanded. It should not matter, for he liked her no better than she did him. But he had never imagined that he would be denied the one clear advantage that one was supposed to gain by marrying. The whole thing was giving him a headache. Or perhaps it was the heavy scent of the Viscountess’s perfume, which was redolent of the flowers she had been forcing on her stepdaughter.